had something of an aptItude for read- ing handwriting on walls-two-a-day vaudeville already in 1925 was almost finished, and Bessie had, both as a moth- er and as a dancer, the very strongest con victions against doing four-a-day shows for the big, new, ever-multiply- ing movie-cum-vaudeville palaces-but, more important than that, ever since she was a child in Dublin and her twin sister succumbed, backstage, of galloping undernutrition, Security, in any form, has had a fatal attraction for Bessie. At any rate, in the spring of 1925, at the end of a so-so run at the Albee, in Brooklyn, with five children bedded down with German measles in three and a half un stately rooms at the old Hotel Alamac, In Manhattan, and a notIon that she was pregnant again ( mistaken, it turned out; the babies of the family, Zooey and Franny, were not born tIll 1930 and 1935, respectively), Bessie suddenly appealed to an honest-to-God "influential" ad- mirer, and my father took a job in w hat he in variably referred to, for years and years, with no real fear of being contradIcted around the house, as the ministratIve end of commercia] radio, and Gallagher & Glass's extended tour was officially over. What I'm mainly trying to do here, though, is to find the firmest way of suggesting that this curi- ous footlight-and-three-ring heritage has been an almost ubiquitous and en- tirely significant reality in the lives of all seven of the children in our family. The two youngest, as I've already men- tioned, are, in fact, professional actors. But no heavy line can be drawn quite there. The elder of my two sisters, to most outward appearances, is a fully landed suburbanite, mother of three chIldren, co-owner of a two-car, filled garage, but at all supremely joyful mo- ments she will, all but literally, dance for her life; I've seen her, to my horror, break into a very passable soft-shoe rou- tIne (a sort of Ned Wayburn out of Pat and Marion Rooney) with a five-day- old niece of mine in her arms. My late younger brother Walt, who was killed in a postwar accident in Japan (and of whom I plan to say as little as possible in this series of sittings, if I'm to get through them), was a dancer, too, in a perhaps less spontaneous but far more professional sense than my sister Bou Boo His twin-our brother ,^T aker, our monk, our impounded Carthusian- as a boy, privately canonized W. c. Fields and in that inspired and obstrep- erous but rather holy man's image used to practice juggling with cigar boxes, among a great many other things, by the hour, till he became spectacularly New! Only one of its kind Stanley! \ f -. =-. \ .;-:: 'i., .... J 71 T alon* Little-Zip, I presu me ... Never thought they could make a trouser zipper so right for the trend to lightness in men's wear. Although it's only the old-fashioned size, it's strong enough for the heaviest wi nter tweeds .. .Amazing-the difference it makes in the tailoring of suits, slacks and walk shorts 1. say, demand the Talon Little-Zip on your next shoppi ng safa ri ! 4" *REG. u. S. PAT. OFF. TALON, INC., MEADVILLE. PA. .. J .&.. o,;$ ... ,'w .t':;'-